Strategic Human Resource Management Approach To Achieve Organizational Goals

Introduction
The key to any successful firm or an organization is its resources. Resources are always scarce and need to be used efficiently and sustainably to maintain a competitive advantage over other firms. Human Resource is one of the most valuable resources of a firm or an organization and knowing how to manage human resources is critical for survival of organizations and firms (Armstrong, 2008). Human Resource management is crucial in efficiently allocating human resources for maximum efficiency to achieve organizational goals. Wright et al (2011) argues, “In times of plenty, firms easily justify expenditures on training, staffing, reward, and employee involvement systems, but when faced with financial difficulties, such HR systems fall

Armstrong (2008) defined SHRM as an approach defining how the organization’s goals would be achieved through people by means of HR strategies and integrated HR policies and practices. HR practices leads to choice of strategic plans for development of overall HR strategies and implementation of strategy while changing employees' behaviour (Armstrong, 2008). Therefore, Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) is widely gaining popularity and has become a requisite for organizations that aim to sustain in the modern times. Three widespread theories/approaches of SHRM will be discussed and compared in this study; The Best Practice Approach, The Contingency Approach and the Resource Based View/Approach. These theories have incited a lot of debates to justify their positions as the better alternative to the

This approach argues that there is no ‘universal and one way’ of managing an organization and whether or not a particular combination will work for different organizations is always debatable because of environmental differences (Baird and Moushlam in Robinson, 2007). This approach is also aimed to achieve organizational goals through combination of HR practices and other business strategies. This approach ‘vertically and horizontally integrates’ HR strategies and organizational choice of competitive strategies which will lead to improved business performance (Robinson,